


the ghost in your machine, your real life suicide blonde

by starraya



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-14
Updated: 2015-11-14
Packaged: 2018-05-01 11:40:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5204462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starraya/pseuds/starraya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘She is a ghost bride, he thinks. Miss Havisham. After it all went wrong. But River is no jilted sweetheart or a maiden in a ballad waiting hopelessly for her lover’s return. She has hell smoking in her eyes and a flute of blood-red wine poised at lips that arch into a thin smile.’ She haunts him, of course she does. And in a way, unbeknownst to him, he haunts her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the ghost in your machine, your real life suicide blonde

**Author's Note:**

> From The Doctor’s perspective this is set post-TATM but before he meets Victorian Clara. From River's post-TNOTD.

 

‘I died saving him. In return he saved me to the biggest database in the universe. Left me like a book on a shelf. Didn’t even say goodbye. He doesn’t like endings.’ _River Song, The Name of the Doctor_

‘I won’t ever leave you, even though you’re always leaving me.’ _Claire Abshire, The Time Traveller’s Wife_

* * *

He is moping. He has shut himself away in his ship and moped upon a cloud above Victorian London. Brooding as he sits in an armchair, The Doctor is left  with only the energy to swing an umbrella around with his wrist. A swift flick and it flips. Another more forceful one and it swings - over and over and over again. He has not been outside these past few days; the umbrella has seen little use.

"Pity," he says sullenly, "it hasn’t rained in ages." (He still manages to check the weather daily.)

The Doctor stops the umbrella’s swinging motion with his other hand. "I suppose that’s how it is up on top of a raincloud though, hey?"

"I cannot confirm," a voice replies, jerky and automated and unfeeling.

"I suppose you wouldn’t know."

The Doctor slumps further back into his armchair. The purple velvet is thin and discoloured, almost gravelly in texture after all these years. Beads stud the rim of the arms but most are missing. The claws at the end of the legs are terribly scratched. Slowly, The Doctor takes the umbrella fully within both of his hands. He studies it. Strangely, there is not a mark or cinder on its folds, but it has an earthly, homely scent: petrichor. The Doctor sniffs.

Looking back up from the umbrella, from his position on the console room a few metres away from the console itself and turning in the direction of the voice, he remarks: "Don’t you remember? I picked the restaurant for once. Never knew we would find ourselves on the menu."

"Data or memory storage has not yet been activated in this form."

"Oh well," the energy in his voice limps off. Sinking even further into the chair, he tosses the umbrella to the floor.

"It’s not like I need it anymore," he nods to the discarded umbrella, "no rain Gods here to run from. Not a thing but the clouds. And me." 

Pushing out his lanky legs so that they cross at the ankles with the heel of his left foot touching the floor and the other held aloft, The Doctor flaps out a periodical and resumes his reading.

"They can’t just leave it there!" He pushes the circular spectacles he’s somewhat adopted since Manhattan up on the ridge of his noise with an agitated sigh. "It was just getting good, just beginning. And then . . . bam!" 

Not caring for the creases that will surely ensue, he snaps the periodical shut and crumbles it up within his hands. Once again, his eyes drift to the space beside the console, in the direction of the automated voice; the vertical stream of light there is starting to fade out. (A sort of sleep mode to save energy when he’s not paying full attention, busy reading.) He calls it back to full brightness and excuses his outburst by shouting out the author’s name.

"Wilkie! I suppose Dickens is just as bad, if not worse." He means the cliff-hangers but does not elaborate other than a short muse on how he also can't decide over which of the writers had the messier love-life.

Of course The Doctor has read it all before, every Earth classic, but reading it freshly printed and just dispersed into the Victorian households below where the TARDIS resides was too tantalising an idea not to indulge. Now the decision has left him with nothing but damp disappointment. All his excitement has fizzled out. He has a whole heap of newspapers at his feet, all different dates and printing houses with different story instalments between their covers. In a tempest of reading he has read some things thrice over and some ends before their starts. He has tripped through stories as disjointed as a spider’s web, one that is nearly torn apart with only a few micro fibres holding it together.

He resolves to give up his reading pursuits, at least for that afternoon. They have only succeeded in distracting him for 7 minutes. (And that was him reading with an effort to be slow and savour the tales. Admittedly, he rushed a few.)

Letting the crumpled ball of paper drop to the floor, he springs up from his armchair. He runs over to hover in front of the vertical stream of light. He trembles like a child peeking out of their bedroom curtains on Christmas Eve in an effort to catch a glimpse of those ever elusive hooves, hoping that magic is out there somewhere and that not all the lies adults tell are true lies. Beside the console The Doctor hovers and waits and stares at the beam of light. It does not flicker. It will never fully vanish as long as he watches it and seeks it out. He stares into its green eyes with such fixation that the floor appears to go from beneath him and the console fall away into nothingness. The only thing rooting him in the here and now is the iridescence of those greens. He can neither register the weight of his boots nor the tingling in his hand when he threads it through blonde curls, when his flesh sinks behind the code. The light in front of him seems to beam brighter.

It wears him away like the sun burning away the hue of a fabric.

* * *

One day the vacant smile on his wife’s hologram snaps into a frown. Her head whips around. Her eyes narrow and pierce him with their knowingness.

 "I did tell you, my love," the hologram says, "I don’t like men who get all grumpy in their old age." The hologram vanishes on its own accord. The Doctor has a feeling he will not be able to summon it back, but still his eyes linger at the empty space it leaves behind.

Without warning it begins to rain inside the TARDIS. It pours down for two days solid everywhere, in every room and every crevice of his ship. Somehow it appears not to harm the machine. It appears not to electrify the machinery and blow it up into tatters of flames. The rain appears not to drench the hundreds of shelves of books in the library or to flood the swimming pool.

The trouble is that the TARDIS doors are jammed. No amount of pushing or groaning or threats to find a TARDIS Type-40 manual and adhere to every one of the rules and regulations will open them. So, The Doctor stalks around, head drooping miserably down. He stalks around and sits and gets back up and walks and sits in the chair endlessly under the open umbrella. He finds chance after chance to grumble about the fact he now has 700 years bad luck –- at least according to Gallifreyan superstition. Try as he might, through either messing with the controls or pleading with his mutinous ship –- because this is his wife’s doing and Sexy always takes her side -- the doors do not budge.

He cannot sleep a wink but he’s stayed awake weeks on end before. A bit of rain won’t kill him, not if it carries on elusively fizzling away before it can puddle -- although the periodicals are now sadly a sodden mess. For a passing moment he thinks of the irony of the possibility of drowning without a pond or a river nearby him.

On the afternoon of the second day dizziness infects his head. It picks up and whirls around the thousands of tiny goblins that have begun to unremittingly hack at the inside of his skull with pickaxes. He feels himself, either from a lack of freedom or the trickery of the illusion or both, sliding into delirium.

When River steps through the TARDIS doors he’s convinced of that fact. A key drips from a chain in her hand. His eyes fix on its sway as she drifts towards him. It swings like a pendulum, as if she is the Mistress of Time itself.

Somehow the rain seems not to touch her. It seems to flow off her as if on a kind of resistant wax. She floats towards him like a cloud of insoluble white ashes. He wonders if her lips would taste dry and bitter if he kissed them. Stumbling like a child in her direction, he grapples blindly at the air in front of him for a clutch of her dress, for a clutch of her hair.

"Oh, my love," a voice flows towards him. He has squeezed his eyes shut not only against the thud, thud of the pickaxes but also against the blinding white of her apparition. _A vision in white._ The old earth saying forces its way inside his brain as he tries to follow and find River’s voice.

It is no use.

'Oh, my love' diverges into many streams of sound that eddy around the console room and swirl around his staggering body.

"Oh, my love," he hears her call one last time. With disappointment? Affection? Sympathy? He cannot figure it out. Black eclipses his vision and suddenly the floor is his comfort.

The rain ceases shortly after.

* * *

When he regains consciousness the squares of the grated floor of the console room are imprinted into one side of his face like an abnormality, a malignity that has begun to seep out his flesh –- a Hyde. River is lounging in his armchair. Her golden curls tumble over a bodice of lace and pearls, part of a gown of pristine white silk. The material drips off her shoulders, off her hips, down her legs. Between her breasts now hangs the TARDIS key on its gold chain. The hem of her gown however is torn, smudged with mud and dripping with loose ends of fabric. He imagines the image would be complete if only there were lilies in her lap, nearly indiscernible against the while folds of her gown if not for their spindly green stems.

 _She is a ghost bride,_ he thinks. _Miss Havisham. After it all went wrong._ But River is no jilted sweetheart or a maiden in a ballad waiting hopelessly for her lover’s return. She has hell smoking in her eyes and a flute of blood-red wine poised at lips that arch into a thin smile.

As he begins to pick himself up from the floor she raises her glass to him. He thinks a 'Hello Sweetie' purrs from her lips before she goes to sip the wine. He cannot be sure. There are still a few pickaxes at the edge of his brain going strong. In the midst of them a knife flies and lodges in his head. Her voice taunts him.

"Well aren’t you a sight for dead eyes?" She mercilessly butchers the idiom.

He is up from the floor but rooted to the spot.

"River," he breathes out her name slowly. His mouth draws around the two dusty syllables again. They taste familiar and yet forgotten, like a favourite book you accidentally left at a library when you were returning the borrowed ones because it somehow had slipped, unknowingly, in between the others.

"How did you? How can you?" He asks, his brow furrowing in confusion and disbelief.

River ignores him and takes another sip of her wine. "Or perhaps not quite? After all," she shrugs, "word’s out that you’re not much of a healer anymore."

In stunned silence The Doctor takes a step forward. Only one.

"Care to testify?" River propositions him after listing out her accusations. At his lack of response a heavy sigh escapes her lips. He clenches his jaw then, a darkness clouding over his sight that is so burning hot that it pricks his eyes and narrows them to slits. He’s in no mood for her theatrics.

"I left the business," he finally retorts, "you just _can’t_ find the customers these days."

River’s hand stills, her glass of wine half-lowered from her lips. Her back stiffens.

"That’s not true," she replies. Her voice is gossamer soft like a cobweb about to be blown away by a winter breeze. It quivers with the disappointment of confirmed expectations. He’s a man moping alone on a cloud – the blackest.

"Tell me what is then, River," he lashes out the imperative with his tongue but then feebly ends up choking on her name with a barely concealed sob. Suddenly, the thing he’s longed for most for weeks on end sits before him.

"Are you real?" He finds himself asking, unsure if this is some cruel trick of his brain. What if she is only a hallucination?

"Real as I want to be," she answers, "real as you want me to be, Sweetie." Carefully, River rests her half-finished glass of wine on the arm of the chair and rises. The white fabric simultaneously clings to her body and drips off it like water on a hot, misted window pane.

"It appears that living is still available to the dead . . . if they want it," she explains, regaining some of her fiery tone towards the sentence’s monosyllabic end.

"Your services may not be in demand, mine on the other hand . . . who’d you think helped Madame Vastra hunt down dear Jack the Ripper?"

"You and the Paternoster Gang," he exclaims, ‘of course."

"I’m still their number one consulting detective," she smirks and can hardly resist the irony of adding, "in life and death."

"But that’s impossible. How can you. . ."

"I do _have_ careers, you know." She did set up a private detective agency in New York in the thirties she wants to remind him but decides against dredging up the city. She strides towards him.

"At least I get out. No point in us both being caged up, dear," River reprimands as she stops in front of her husband. She has nearly closed the distance between them so that her mouth is now mere millimetres away from his. On it he can smell the sweetness of her drink.

"Now, that reminds me," her eyes drift down to his neck as if they’ve got all the time in the world. (Technically, they have within a time machine. The Doctor just didn’t realise how much of their time together was still unspent.)

River takes the silky material of one corner of his bowtie within her fingers. Titling her head, she muses. "Don’t you _ever_ listen to me?"

Her hand falls away from his bowtie and her eyes flick back up to his. He wants to reply and tell her that of course he does, that he always listens to her, but his mouth does not move. His eyes are too concentrated on watching her, for fear if he doesn’t that she will simply fade away like her hologram.

"I told you not to travel alone," she reminds him. She tilts her head in the direction of where her hologram was, the hologram she once programmed in commands to snap and fizzle out after too many hours of being used.

"What were you going to say to another of your plucky Jane Eyre’s," this time River looks down to the console room floor as if it is glass and she is peering down over the smoky black and red rooftops of Victorian London, "when they come up here and see your wife all locked up and hidden away?"

"No one’s coming up here," he snaps back with more exasperation than intended. His words ring around the TARDIS console room. With each echo they turn more into an avowal of a petulant child who wants to get there way. However, when he repeats ‘no one’ to her its finality tolls like a church bell. He steps back from her and starts wandering beside the console, fiddling aimlessly with the controls, unable to bear the proximity between them any longer.

"My, my. . . you really have turned into a right old misery guts," she says.

"I put you in a prison," he finally admits what had always troubled him. His tone is seeped with self-pity for the anguish that has haunted him ever since he saved her to the library mainframe, an anguish that has grown ever since he learnt the uncomfortable truth: River Song has no home in a prison.

"Hardly. But I am disappointed. You think I can be trapped so easily?" She is tired of his guilt and self-pity. She is tired of his willingness to write an end to everything.

The Doctor smiles ruefully at her question. Of course, death has no hold over River Song. If the walls of Stormcage can’t hold her, nothing will. Still, a sense of uneasiness tugs at his insides.

"I don’t want someone else," he says, "to travel with, I mean. I’ll lose them, like I always do."

"Oh," River glides towards him and this time he does not move away from her, "if we all thought like that we’d never love at all." _The world would be a dark place indeed_ , she thinks. He goes to speak but presses her finger against his lips.

"Shush," she whispers as if about to tell him a bedtime story or soothe a nightmare he’s just woken up from.

"Shush," she says again before removing her hand and putting her lips on his. He threads his hands through her soft hair for the second time that day and clutches at its realness.

 _Home_ , he thinks.

* * *

Later on, when they are in bed together, as she lies on her front beside him while he traces imaginary figures of eight into her the hollow of her bare back, she mutters to him: "Whoever they are, don’t turn them into a fairy-tale."

He knows she means his new companion. He wants to reply he won’t because they’ll be no new companion, but he refrains. He doesn’t want to argue with her anymore. It would be a waste of breath and time.

"Where are you from, River?" He asks.

"I told you. The Library. Data-ghost."

"I mean, will I see you again? Do you continue to see me?"

"Foreknowledge," sleepily she mumbles only the start of the age-old warning they both know so well. They have already tasted its seductive danger.

"Rule four," he says as his hand falters over its motion, half-way through its next figure of eight. It seems rules are broken from the moment they are made, however, when surprisingly River tells him that he will see her again.

"Will you?" The figures of eights have ceased and now his hand lies limp on her back.

Avoiding his question if she’ll see him again, River continues. "When you do I won’t know you will be able to see me."

For a moment she wonders what makes him pretend not to be able to see her on Trenzalore, a place she visited a few days back. She’s mentally linked with Clara, a girl shattered across time and space forever, living and dying but somewhere, sometime always alive. But River has always known, unlike her husband, that there are no such things as endings. There is just the closing of a chapter before the opening of another. Perhaps there is a pause between their readings but pauses do not last forever.

Clara Oswald is waiting.

When The Doctor wakes up in the morning the other side of the bed is empty. River is gone. Besides the leftover wine glass still resting on the arm of his chair in the console room, he finds no trace of her. The liquid left in the glass sloshes around as he picks up it. He goes to tip it outside, through the clouds. He doesn’t bother to check first if the TARDIS doors will open to him.

He already knows that they will.

In two days time Madame Vastra calls and he realises that River must be partly behind the Paternoster Gang’s insistence of watching over him while finding him a new companion. In two days time he receives the call and is told Clara’s word.

"Pond."

Ghostly, the word shimmers in his ear. It beckons him on.

* * *

He’s got grey hair, attack-eyebrows and a lingering suspicion of hugs. This body’s got sonic shades he has always half-expected one day to be snatched by another’s hand in mock disgust. If he does not relinquish them The Doctor thinks he may risk a sulk amongst otters again after getting booted from his ship. He imagines catching the sound of prayers from behind his back for the merciful return of his old penchant for hats.

This regeneration rocks an electric guitar. He has had daydreams once or twice about skating over a frozen Thames, the snow fluttering down like sugar dust as he jams out tune after tune. (The Doctor’s sure Stevie Wonder won’t mind if he joins in with the singer. His wife’s agreement he’s not so sure on or that of the other skaters around them.)

Early 19th century, he thinks. He’ll take her on her birthday, two festivities in one. He’ll surprise her.

Of course, when Christmas does come it is she who surprises him.

Unlike in his daydreaming she will not be a ghost. She will be real. _He is the ghost_ , he will think for a moment, but then River will take his hand to steady him as her idiot husband precariously whizzes around on skates with an electric guitar slung around his neck. He will feel the warmth of her flesh and the blood thrumming beneath it and the moment will float away as soft and soundless as the snowfall around them.

**Author's Note:**

> N.B. I apologise if there are any mistakes. I always proof-read until the words start to go blurry on the screen but I know that some might slip through. I also tried to double space as I know some parts are very dialogue heavy but the computer went weird and the gaps turned massive.
> 
> The title is taken from the fabulously ferocious ‘She’s Not Me’ by Lana Del Rey.
> 
> I would apologise for the indulgent Victorian literature references but I just couldn’t resist, particularly as the show so often draws upon the ideas of fairytales and stories such as in Season 5 as well as that of ghosts like in Season Seven.
> 
> I also do not particularly think that the trip to the Winter Frost Fair of 1814 for River’s Birthday will be the basis for this year's Christmas Special (as I am writing this before that episode airs) although I can’t wait to have River back and see her dynamics with Twelve. The idea was just too lovely to resist writing and was one of the first things that popped into my head when I heard that she would return for Christmas. 
> 
> As always, I hope you enjoyed it too.


End file.
